How tall is zhou enlai

What followed was dramatically blacked out by a swipe of his calligraphy brush. According to Ms Tsoi, the dashing Zhou was already in love with Li, the 17 year-old son of a wealthy benefactor, who he had studied with at a prestigious, Western-style school in Tianjin. During his years in the city, he also met Deng, an acquaintance who would one day be his wife.

But in , says Ms Tsoi, Zhou's main ambition was to get a place at university in Japan, and to convince his beloved to join him there. According to his diary, by August, he was devastated to hear that Li had been accepted at the University of Hong Kong, and planned to move there. I drifted off yet was unable to stay asleep. I was miserable! Ms Tsoi says she was unable to uncover any evidence of a physical relationship between the two, or indeed written evidence of Li's romantic feelings toward Zhou.

It is just one of many interpretations of the missing pieces of Zhou's life - and she does not begin to address what it means to be gay. But she believes the younger man cared greatly for him, as Li unexpectedly refused his place at university, opting to travel to Britain with Zhou, via France, in Li was able to secure a place at the University of Manchester the following year.

Zhou, born to a genteel but penniless family, sought entry to the University of Edinburgh, but was unable to afford the fees. Broke, discouraged and heartbroken - according to the book - he gave up the idea of studying in Britain and returned to France, where it was cheaper to live. After losing the chance to be with Li and needing financial support, the author says, Zhou was recruited into the Communist Party, to which he would famously and wholeheartedly dedicate the rest of his life.

Ms Tsoi, a Sichuan native who moved to Hong Kong in , says she was frequently shocked by the revelations she was able to uncover from public sources.

I am just a journalist. I was so surprised that no-one else had seen what I was seeing," she says. But after consulting a number of other sources, including Deng's papers, she became convinced of her thesis. Because Zhou died in , almost 40 years ago, she does not believe her revelations will have any political fallout on the current leadership in Beijing. But she does think it may help a growing movement for the rights of sexual minorities in China.

XiaogangWei, a Beijing-based veteran activist for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, agrees, telling BBC News that a book focusing on Zhou's possible sexual orientation would be big news in his community. I think that's really positive. He joined the Party in and returned to China in , becoming the political commissar of the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton during the first united front with the Nationalists. But Zhou was always most prominent during periods in which the CCP reached out to otherwise hostile political forces.

General George Marshall. After the founding of the People's Republic in , Zhou became premier of the Government Affairs later State Council and foreign minister. In he acted as China's bridge to the nonaligned world at the Bandung Conference, and in the same year helped engineer initial contacts with the U.

He passed the foreign minister portfolio to Chen Yi in but continued to play an active role in foreign policy. Zhou supported Mao Zedong in the latter's Cultural Revolution attack on the entrenched Party bureaucracy, and subsequently played a critical role in rebuilding political institutions and mediating numerous political quarrels. With the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Zhou advocated an opening to Japan and the West to counter the Russian threat. That same year Zhou was diagnosed as having cancer, and he began shedding some of his responsibilities, especially to Deng Xiaoping who was rehabilitated in April Zhou was also a strong advocate of modernization, particularly at the Fourth National People's Congress in January Amid radical attacks on him during the Anti-Confucius Campaign, Zhou entered the hospital during and died on January 8, Zhou continued to affect Chinese politics even after his death.

In April , the removal of memorial wreaths placed in Tiananmen Square in Zhou's honor sparked riots that led to the second ousting of Deng Xiaoping. With the purge of the "Gang of Four" in October , his policy of "four modernizations" received the full endorsement of the new leadership.

His selected works were published in December , and three years later a memorial room for him was established in Mao's mausoleum. Deng Xiaoping. Born in , Deng Xiaoping d. He held prominent positions in the government in the s and s, but he was removed from office and imprisoned during the years of the Cultural Revolution, His family was persecuted.

Deng Xiaoping reemerged as China's paramount leader shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in Deng Xiaoping's goal in was to set China back on the course of economic development that had been badly interrupted during the final years of Mao's leadership.

Deng's rallying cry became the "Four Modernizations," articulated by Zhou Enlai in , which entailed the development of industry, agriculture, defense, and science and technology. If we believe we can do good by such service, should we risk the moral opprobrium that might come with it?

Should men of integrity impose an absolute ban on such service? Suppose such service might seem the only way to guarantee the survival of our parents or our own children?

Or suppose we set ourselves a firm limit—say five or ten years—after which time we undertake to sever our connections? He needed Zhou Enlai. This is cogent, and even convincing, but it remains deeply ambiguous about the relationship between the two men, and how we assess their relative contributions. Here we see a different Zhou at work, and with completely contradictory effects. As Gao writes:. So which Zhou is the real Zhou? He was also capable of astonishing ruthlessness at times when he considered it necessary for survival: for instance, in recent years scholars have identified Zhou Enlai as the leader of death squads in the early s that executed and even buried alive Communist turncoats who were believed to have given away secret Party information to Nationalist Party interrogators.

Zhou was surely often overawed by Mao, but not fatally so. As Zhou declared:.